There is something profoundly melancholy in Fox's degeneracy. Its commencement is clearly marked. In 1756 he was an easy companion, a good friend, kindly and beloved; he was honoured and admired; he was the second man in the House of Commons, willing and able to dare all. But when he was discarded, and had subsided into the Paymastership, he seems to have suffered a gradual deterioration. His objects became sordid; he lost the finer elements of his character; his ambition sank into something composed of vindictiveness and greed; his generous wine became corked and bitter. But at the time we are writing of, he was still amiable, still courageous, still warm with some instinct of honour, patriotism, and high emulation, still an able and masculine figure. It is perhaps unfair to anticipate a decline which is outside our limits. But the change is so remarkable, throwing, as it were, a back light on some of the puzzling aspects of Fox's earlier career, that it cannot well be unnoticed. More ominous of Pitt's attitude to the Ministry than any small incidents of debate was Pitt's silence. For three successive sessions of Parliament, in 1752, 1753, and in that which closed in April 1754, he practically held his peace. Nothing could be more sinister, nothing could mark more emphatically his discontent. Sickness, it appears, accounted in part for this abstinence from the arena. 'After a year of sullen illness,' as Horace Walpole describes it, he intervened in 1753; and this was followed by another twelve months of silence and of illness not less sullen. The intervention of 1753 was not very happy. By an Act passed in June 1753, foreign Jews had been rendered capable of naturalisation. The Bill had passed into law without serious opposition, but soon aroused great popular clamour. Grub Street, as usual, was called into requisition. 'But Lord! how surprised when they heard of the news That we were to be servants to circumcised Jews, To be negroes and slaves instead of True Blues, Which nobody can deny.' Newcastle was charged with having been bribed. 'That money you know is a principal thing, It will pay a Duke's mortgage or interest bring.'[205] [Sidenote: Nov. 27, 1753.]